Words matter. These are the best Ezra Furman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was rather obsessed with angels.
I first got into music when I heard punk, and it was saying maybe it’s OK if you don’t live up to the expectations various authorities have for you.
I want to be a force that tries to revive the human spirit rather than crush it, to open possibilities rather than close them down. Sometimes a passionate negativity is the best way to do that.
There is something embarrassing about asking for money, but if I hadn’t done that, I would have not continued to be a professional musician.
Desperate times make for desperate songs.
I honestly feel like I’ve been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after ‘Day Of the Dog’ came out.
It’s a good feeling to not tell people what’s going on.
I could write a joke song really easily, but I think something that might be true for my generation is that there’s a certain irony or detachedness expected of us, even though we really feel sincere. So the only way to sincerity is through a joke.
I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.
I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases – I’m addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.
If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.
I think of myself as someone who’s trying to be a great songwriter and a great performer. And I mean really great.
I write good songs out of fear… fear of failure. Because if they’re not good enough, you feel yourself starting to fall.
Listening to songs is like eating and writing songs is like vomiting. You’re putting a ton of stuff in, it combines in unpredictable ways, and comes back out in a big mess.
We spent a lot of time making ‘Transangelic Exodus’ and toward the end of it, my ability and my love for music – that is, just garage music, direct and immediate – started to feel neglected.
Chuck Berry invented rock ‘n’ roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.
We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.
Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity.
You have to be an anti-racist to not be racist. Because it’s just a cultural tide that will pull you into it if you’re not swimming against it.
A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.
Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum.
Not only am I a shy person, I take a little while to say what I mean, especially in a social situation, and usually those move too fast for me to say anything at all.
You have to make a character of yourself if you’re going to be known to strangers.
I want to make the greatest record ever made. It’s the only thing I can think about.
I think I’m becoming a climate activist.
I am frustrated at misconceptions of me, and being cast in a role.
I wrote ‘My Teeth Hurt’ in April 2018 when my teeth hurt and I didn’t have dental insurance.
My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.
My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.
I think I’m gradually becoming a more politically aware person.
Sometimes there’s a day where I don’t feel good being out in the world, and I feel unsafe in the world in general. And an anxiety about just showing up in the world. It’s kind of irrational, but people do say things to me out in the street about how I’m dressed.
Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.
I wear what I want to wear and appear on stage as myself.
I’m not an actor.
I’m a big fan of Louis CK – I think he’s a master of standup.
Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.
I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.
I’ve been writing songs since I was a teenager, so one kind of song I’ve written a lot is about, I don’t know, teen angst feelings – feeling unsure of yourself and immature.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground’s records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.
I get stage fright really bad sometimes, so touring has been hard on me in a lot of ways. But despite that, I love performing.
My favourite artists are the ones who are human, and you know they’re not in a failure-proof environment.
I love it when people write rapturously about music they love.
It’s always about staying competitive with myself… Popularity is something that may happen from time to time, and I don’t trust it and I don’t think it means too much. I’m going for greatness.
I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn’t get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn’t interested in having to follow.
If you’re trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn’t the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.
To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world’s worldview.
I really don’t care about what anyone says unless they are also gender-nonconforming. Then I really listen. I love the solidarity felt between us gender failures.
I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.
More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.
I grew up attending a Conservative day school, Solomon Schechter, until I was about 14, and going to a Reconstructionist synagogue.